The Canon / Pillars / Yoga & Tantra
Pillars · 1946
Autobiography of a Yogi
Yogic & TantricAutobiography of a Yogi recounts the author's life, gurus, and spiritual realizations within the Kriya Yoga lineage of Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar, and the legendary Babaji. Its central claim is that God-realization is attainable through disciplined practice and that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality.
The book proceeds through narrative and testimony, interleaving accounts of masters, miracles, and meditative experience with teaching on prana, the subtle body, and the creative power of concentrated thought, will, and attention. Its method is to make yogic realization vivid through a remembered life.
One of the most enduring spiritual books of the century, it served as a mass-market gateway to yogic consciousness for the West and deliberately married Vedantic Cosmic Consciousness to American mind-science, bridging yoga and the manifestation tradition.
In its words
In man's dream-consciousness, where he has loosened in sleep his clutch on the egoistic limitations that daily hem him round, the omnipotence of his mind has a nightly demonstration.
For this purpose were man and creation made: that he should rise up as master of maya, knowing his dominion over the cosmos.
Practices it teaches
Kriya Yoga — Yogananda's Spinal-Breath Pranayama (public outline)
Kriya Yoga is the central practice Paramahansa Yogananda brought to the West, transmitted through his lineage (Mahavatar Babaji → Lahiri Mahasaya → Sri Yukteswar → Yogananda).
Kriya Pranayama — Lahiri Mahasaya's Revived Spinal Breath (public level)
Kriya Pranayama is the breath-and-attention discipline at the heart of the Kriya Yoga that Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895) is credited with reviving and openly teaching in modern Bengal.
Householder Yoga — practising liberation inside ordinary working life
This is the teaching that made Lahiri Mahasaya famous as the householder yogi: that the highest inner realisation is available not only to renunciates but to ordinary people who work, marry, and raise families…
Banat Banat Ban Jaye — steady practice ripening into inner stillness
"Banat banat ban jaye" — roughly "doing it, doing it, one day it is done" — was Lahiri Mahasaya's encouragement to persevere in meditation: as you keep building something through patient repeated practice, suddenly…
Regular, Disciplined Meditation — Sri Yukteswar's scientific daily sitting
Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936), the Kriya-yoga master and guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, is remembered as much for how he taught practice as for the technique itself: with an exacting, no-nonsense insistence on…
Hong-Sau — watching the breath with the mantra of concentration
Hong-Sau (also written Hong-Sau / Hong-So) is Paramahansa Yogananda's primary concentration technique, taught openly through the SRF Lessons as the bridge between body-readiness and deep meditation.
The Energization Exercises — recharging the body with will-directed life-force
The Energization Exercises are Paramahansa Yogananda's signature system of 38-39 tension-and-relaxation movements, devised in the early 1920s and taught through Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) and Yogoda Satsanga…
Lineage
The author
Paramahansa YoganandaKriya Yoga / God-realization
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Key terms
Kindred books